Hasidic Movement Began 200 Years Ago in Eastern Europe

Hasidism--a popular religious movement marked by ecstasy, mass enthusiasm and charismatic leadership--has survived the attacks of mainstream rabbis, the spread of Western culture and the ravages of Nazism to emerge as one of the most influential strains of modern Judaism. While not the largest, Chabad Lubavitch is the best known Hasidic sect today.

Hasidism started as a persecuted group of followers of an itinerant healer known as the Master of the Good Name. It preached joy in song and dance over dusty scholarship, although followers today are as devoted as any Talmudic scholars to the details of religious law.

The movement was born and flourished amid the chaos of the late 18th Century, when the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe were buffeted by pogroms, border changes and disappointment at the unmasking of Shabtai Tzvi, a phenomenally popular self-proclaimed Messiah who converted to Islam.

By the 1830s “it had become the way of life and leadership structure of the majority of Jews” across much of what is now Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania and Hungary, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia.

The tzaddik, or righteous leader, plays a central role in Hasidism. He is believed by his followers to be a wonder-worker, confessor, moral instructor and practical adviser, powered by an extra measure of the spark of creation and serving as a two-way channel of divine grace. Menachem Mendel Schneerson played this role in Chabad for 44 years.

With the large-scale emigration of modern times, followers of Hasidism spread to Western Europe, Israel and the United States, where they make up a significant proportion of the estimated 10% of Jews who are strictly observant of religious law and tradition.

Chabad’s aggressive outreach program has seen emissaries, dressed in garb that would not have looked out of place in 18th-Century Poland, spread across the world. Its largest community centers on its Brooklyn headquarters, where Lubavitchers have sometimes lived uneasily with their Caribbean-American and other neighbors. Tensions erupted in rioting in August, 1991, after a car in the rebbe ‘s motorcade struck and killed a 7-year-old.